Safe sex advertising campaign offers the bare facts

A hard-hitting government advertising campaign on sexual diseases, featuring raunchy scenes of young people grappling in pubs, clubs and on deserted footpaths, launches today in an attempt to make 18- to 24-year-olds think of condoms as "essential wear" when they go out for a night.

The TV and magazine adverts are intended to shock by showing attractive and apparently healthy ordinary young people "on the pull" whose rapidly discarded clothing bears logos and slogans reading "gonorrhoea" and "chlamydia". Sexual diseases are spreading, says the whispered voiceover. If it was as easy to tell who was infected as it is to tell the designer of a pair of jeans, you would wear a condom.

The £4m campaign was widely welcomed by sexual health organisations such as Brooks, the Family Planning Association and the Terrence Higgins Trust, but there are fears that NHS cuts may stop the government spending the rest of the £50m it promised for raising awareness of sexual infections among young adults.

Deborah Jack, chief executive of the National Aids Trust, said: "Changing attitudes requires long-term and sustained efforts. It is vitally important that the government keeps its promise to spend the additional £46m over the remaining two years. Even in a time of budgetary constraint, to cut back on a sexual health campaign is the worst kind of false economy."

Anne Weymann, chief executive of the Family Planning Association, welcomed the campaign but said a long-term sustained effort was needed.

But health minister Caroline Flint, launching the advertising campaign, declined to rule out a reduction in spending. The £50m was for three years, she said. The campaign and additional spending this year would amount to £7m in total across departments - the education department was involved in the campaign to reduce teenage pregnancies. Her department was spending on the new campaign double the money that it spent on the last one, two years ago. That campaign was known as the "sex lottery" and was also designed to raise awareness of sexually transmitted infections.

The department later said it had afterwards tracked 1,000 young people in the target audience. It found that three-quarters were aware of the safe sex messages. That was an improvement of 17% from the start of the campaign.

Ms Flint said the aim of the new campaign was "to make carrying and using a condom among this age group as familiar as carrying a mobile phone or putting on a seat belt".